G.O.P. Leaders Dropping Push For an Energy Bill This Year

By CARL HULSE

Published: November 25, 2003

WASHINGTON, Nov. 24—
Congress abandoned its efforts to enact new energy legislation this year as Senate Republican leaders said Monday night that time had run out to resolve an impasse blocking a vote on the measure.

Despite a last-ditch effort by the Bush administration to rescue the measure, a spokeswoman for the Senate majority leader, Bill Frist, said the proposal would be pushed over until 2004.

''Given the short time frame, we will be unable to bring up the energy bill,'' said Amy Call.

She said Dr. Frist remained committed to the proposal and would work over the recess to try to resolve the differences that prompted a Senate filibuster last week against a measure that provides billions of dollars in tax breaks to power producers.

The stalemate is a significant setback for President Bush, a former oil executive who made developing a new energy policy an early goal of his administration. But the legislation, which gained new momentum after the blackout in August, ran into significant opposition from conservation groups and lawmakers who complained they had been shut out of the negotiations over the bill.

Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham was dispatched to the Capitol to explore the possibility of abandoning a particularly contentious provision that would grant limited legal protection to producers of a gasoline additive blamed for water pollution around the nation. Vice President Dick Cheney, who formulated the White House energy policy in 2001, also made telephone calls to important lawmakers, officials said.

''It is certainly something that is being looked at,'' said Mr. Abraham about eliminating the immunity for manufacturers of the additive, known as MTBE. That provision has become the focus of opponents of the wide-ranging measure.

With senators trying to adjourn Tuesday, there was little time to work out a compromise. The effort to advance the bill was complicated by the Senate's concentration on the battle over Medicare drug coverage, which was taking most of the attention of top lawmakers in each party.

Some officials close to the talks said Democratic unhappiness over losing a close procedural vote that could have blocked the Medicare legislation made them less inclined to support an energy compromise because of their reluctance to give the president victories on both major domestic initiatives.

Administration officials said when it became clear they probably could not win on another vote, they decided that it would be better to let the current tensions in the Senate ease and try again in 2004.

Senator Pete V. Domenici, Republican of New Mexico and the chairman of the joint House-Senate conference committee that drafted the energy plan, said Monday that he favored taking out the MTBE provision to advance the rest of the bill.

''The question is, do we kill the whole bill and get nothing?'' Mr. Domenici said.

Republicans involved in the talks said there was some receptiveness in the House, which insisted on the protection as part of the measure, to reaching a new agreement over MTBE. But an aide to the House majority leader, Tom DeLay, said Mr. DeLay was not interested.

''We see no need for a giveaway to trial lawyers simply because a minority of the Senate wants to filibuster the energy bill,'' said Stuart Roy, a spokesman for Mr. DeLay.

Under the proposal in the energy bill, manufacturers of MTBE, or methyl tertiary butyl ether, would be protected from product defect suits filed after Sept. 5, a date that could disrupt a series of legal actions filed since then. The industry says it deserves the protection because the federal government itself promoted the production of MTBE as an additive to make cleaner burning gasoline. Opponents say the provision could force communities to pay for costs of cleaning up MTBE pollution.

The Senate leadership fell two votes short on Friday of cutting off a filibuster of the $31 billion measure, which also seeks to improve the reliability of the power grid, as a coalition of Democrats and Republicans raised objections to the bill's cost and contents. Lawmakers and aides said Monday that none of the senators who blocked the bill last week had changed their positions.

The Senate Democratic leader, Tom Daschle, who voted for the energy measure because of its proposal to expand the use of corn-based ethanol, said he believed that chances to enact the measure this year were fading.

''I think if Senator Frist thought he had two additional votes, it would have come back very quickly,'' Mr. Daschle said. ''At least at this point, I don't know that he's been successful.''

It was not certain that eliminating the liability waiver for producers of MTBE would be sufficient to win over the two remaining votes when the Senate takes up the measure again. Many critics of the measure have major objections to other parts of the bill. And dropping the provision might switch the positions of a few senators who voted to break the filibuster, particularly those from oil-producing states like Texas, Louisiana and Oklahoma.

Though Republican officials intend to renew their push again early in 2004, any effort to change the overall proposal could renew the many regional policy fights that had to be settled to advance the measure this far and those disputes could be amplified in an election year.